The internet was originally designed to withstand nuclear war, so that a functioning military network could coordinate a retaliation quickly.

The network protocols themselves are self-healing, routing around failures, very resilient.

The internet itself, even today, is incredibly difficult to destroy. It is nearly impossible to take it down.

However, the internet that most people think of as the internet, Facebook Google etc. Are centralized services that are trivial to take down.

Peer to peer protocols like email, torrents, are also nearly impossible to take down.

The examples of Russia and China isolating themselves, are different. That’s the network designers isolating the network. It’s not a third party trying to destroy the network.

A 1993 Time Magazine article quotes computer scientist John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”[7]

That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.

The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.

It’s somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.

Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.

Because then it was a robust network with a myriad websites and not just those four websites linking to each other. Also, they weren’t all dependant on adsense or akamai to function.

This opinion remains largely correct - the Internet as a network is very difficult to take down.

However things have happened that have undermined the Internet in favour of commercial priorities.

Net Neutrality was a major principle of the Internet but that is under attack, particularly in the US, where infrastructure providers want to maximise profit by linking their income to each Gb used rather than just paid as a utility. Their costs are largely fixed in infrastructure but they push the lie that they need to be paid for how busy that infrastructure is. A network router doesn’t care whether it’s transferring 1gb or 10gb, it only matters if you hit capacity and the network needs to be expanded. The Internet providers instead want profit profit profit so are pushing for a way to maximise it.

The other major issue has been consolidation and that’s thanks to monopolies being allowed to form and dictate how the Internet works. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - they’ve all used their services to try to manipulate customers into their walled gardens and prevent competition.

So the Internet as many people think of it is very vulnerable - big centralised services can have outages that affect everyone because people don’t have much choice.

But the reality is the underlying protocols and infrastructure remains robust. Google might have an outage, but the Web itself is still functional. Email protocols and file transfer protocols still work. The problem is people who are sitting in Googles walled garden of services are locked out of everything. And with Googles huge monopoly on search and advertising it means lots of other major services are out too.

So the Internet itself is fine. It’s the services and monopolies built on it thay are the problem.

This has obviously been proven false with the Great Firewall of China, and of Russia’s latest attempts of completely disconnecting from the global internet.

Not it hasn’t. Pretty much the only country which manages it is NK, and that’s because they have 100% control of their citizens.

With TOR and mesh networking, some sort of a system will remain no matters who tries what. The level or communication that was extremely centralised and possibly censored were things before the 80’s. After that, you could just host your own site online and “hide the ip” (not really tho but hosting your things in another country was sort of an equivalent). So information starred glowing much mire freely.

And becsuse all these techs exist, communication will ever regress to such a state that it was in.

So an exaggeration, sort of. Depending on how you define “internet”.

Neither of your examples “take the internet down”. It’s still here, some users are severed.

There is a lot of confused misinterpretation in this thread. “Can’t be taken down” was a thing, but it was about how you can lose big chunks of the network and have the rest of it still work. That was misinterpreted at the time, in fairness, and it’s even less true now, where centralization in both the infrastructure and the hosting have a lot of things dropping at once and being disrupted, but it’s still technically true. Ukrainian drones are out there beaming up to satellite internet and being used in active warfare in the middle of a battlefield. Which hey, in that context, robust military communication was the original intent of the network to begin with. Given the previous baseline is wired telephone, the characterization isn’t that far off.

Censorship is different, but also true. You can isolate a chunk of the Internet, and once you’ve done that if you have very centralized control you can monitor it, but that’s a high bar. And of course outside of those cases people struggle to limit communications they don’t want, from nazi chatter to piracy.

At the time I used to think that was a good thing, now… yeah, harder to justify. Turns out “free information” didn’t automatically make everyone smarter. I have lots of apologies to give to teachers and professors of theory of communication that were trying to explain this to us in the 90s and we were all “nah, man, their only crime was curiosity, hack the planet, free the information” and all that.

It is just the services themselves are centralised now (it wasnt always like this) federation is taking us back closer to the old ideal.

I don’t recall ever hearing that specifically

Somewhat similar though, I remember being told that anything you put out on the internet is out there forever. Which may not technically be true, there’s a lot of lost pieces of internet history, but the core of that statement isn’t really to be taken literally, it’s more that once you put something online it’s out of your control what everyone else who might have access to it does with that data, you can’t really control what people download, screenshot, save, repost, or when it may resurface.

But back to what you’re saying - even with China and Russia, and other attempts at censorship, the internet still carries on. You can take down, wall off, censor, etc parts of the internet for a lot of people, but taking the entire internet down would be a massive undertaking, probably more than what any country or even any realistically feasible alliance of countries could hope to achieve, as long as there are people with computers linked together somewhere, the internet endures in some fashion.

There’s a lot of redundancy in the internet, there’s no one big box to blow up or one cable to cut that carries the entirety of the internet, it’s millions of devices all linked together in millions of different ways that make up the internet. You can take down parts of it, maybe even most of of it, but it would be nearly impossible to never every last thread of the internet without some truly apocalyptic event happening, even if all that’s left at the end of the day is two nerds on opposite sides of the planet with ham radios hooked up to laptops sending emails back and forth, or some friends sending memes back and forth on thumb drives via carrier pigeon, you could still say that the internet is alive, if not exactly thriving.

Because back then the Internet wasn’t controlled by just a few big corporations.

Probably because of the (originally) decentralized nature. But it is everything but decentralized, pretty much like water infrastructure or streets. So many single points is failure. Sure you could drive 1000 miles through 100 towns, and with only few doing that it will “only” take a lot longer. But route a mayor portion of the traffic through there and that will be the end of that.

Because you literally were calling other computers directly. As long as you had dial tone you had internet.

Also, phone books existed for the internet. Google wasn’t a thing, so getting from one website to another was peer distributed by mouth and paper.

It’s incredibly hard to take that offline.